CNN –
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jon Fosse for “his innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unspeakable,” the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday in Stockholm.
Fosse, 64, was born on the west coast of Norway. His work includes around 40 plays as well as a number of novels, poems, essays, children’s books and translations.
The committee praised the author’s style, known as “Fosse minimalism.”
“Fosse presents everyday situations that are immediately recognizable in our own lives. “His radical reduction of language and dramatic action expresses in the simplest terms the strongest human feelings of fear and powerlessness,” the committee said.
His major work – seven works collected in a single volume entitled Septology – tells the story of an aging painter and widower living alone and grappling with the realities of religion, identity, art and family life.
“Septology” – which runs to around 800 pages – was praised for its formal experimentation. Fosse’s meditative prose is rarely interrupted by periods or other forms of punctuation, giving his philosophical interrogation an evocative flow.
Hakon Mosvold Larsen/NTB/AFP/Getty Images
Jon Fosse at the Norwegian Theater in Oslo in September 2019.
“Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographical, with modernist artistic techniques,” the committee said, counting Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Austrian poet Georg Trakl among those who influenced his style.
“While Fosse shares the negativity of his predecessors, it cannot be said that his particular Gnostic vision leads to a nihilistic contempt for the world. “There is indeed great warmth and humor in his work, as well as a naive vulnerability to his sober images of human experience,” the committee added.
The selection of Fosse as this year’s laureate will do little to counter criticism from those who say the committee rewards European writers at the expense of authors on other continents.
Male writers have also dominated the prize in the past: of the 120 literary prize winners, only 17 were women.